A moment later, the curricle was hurtling at a breakneck pace through the crowded West End streets. Jammed, however, between the high, cushioned side of the carriage seat and the rock-hard body of her demonic betrothed, Jessica knew she was in small danger of tumbling out. She leaned back and contemplated Dain’s Steeds from Hell.
They were the worst-tempered horses she’d ever encountered in her life. They fussed and snorted about and objected to everything and everybody that strayed into their path. They tried to trample pedestrians. They exchanged equine insults with every horse they met. They tried to knock over lampposts and curb posts, and strove to collide with every vehicle that had the effrontery to share the same street with them.
Even when they reached Hyde Park, the animals showed no signs of tiring. They tried to run down the workmen finishing the new archway at Hyde Park Corner. They threatened to stampede down Rotten Row—upon which no vehicle but the monarch’s was permitted.
They succeeded in none of their fiendish enterprises, however. Though he waited until the last minute, Dain quelled all attempts at mayhem. To Jessica’s mingled annoyance and admiration, he did so without seeming to make the slightest effort, despite having to drive with only one hand.
“I suppose there wouldn’t be any challenge in it,” she said, thinking aloud, “if your cattle behaved themselves.”
He smoothly drew the right one back from imminent collision with the statue of Achilles and turned the satanic beasts westward into the Drive. “Perhaps your ill temper has communicated itself to them, and they’re frightened. They don’t know where to run, what to do. Is that it, Nick, Harry? Afraid she’ll shoot you?”
The beasts tossed their heads and answered with evil horsey laughter.
Leave it to Dain, she thought, to give his horses Lucifer’s nicknames. And leave it to him to own animals who fully merited the names.
“You’d be ill tempered, too,” she said, “if you’d spent the last week wrestling with guest lists and wedding breakfast menus and fittings and a lot of pestering relatives. You’d be cross, too, if every tradesman in London were besieging your house, and if your drawing room had come to look like a warehouse, heaped with catalogs and samples. They have been plaguing me since the morning our betrothal announcement appeared in the paper.”
“I shouldn’t be ill tempered in the least,” he said, “because I should never be so cork-brained as to let myself be bothered.”
“You’re the one who insisted upon the grand wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square,” she said. “Then you left it all to me. You haven’t made the smallest pretense of helping.”
“I?Help?” he asked incredulously. “What the devil are servants for, you little nitwit? Did I not tell you to send the bills to me? If no one else in the household is competent to do the work, then hire somebody. If you want to be a wealthy marchioness, why don’t you act like one? The working classes work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “The upper classes tell them what to do. You should not upset the social order. Look at what happened in France. They overthrew the established order decades ago, and what have they to show for it? A king who dresses and behaves like a bourgeois, open sewers in their grandest neighborhoods, and not a decently lit street, except about the Palais Royal.”
She stared at him. “I had no idea you were such a Tory snob. Certainly one couldn’t tell, given your choice of companions.”
He kept his gaze upon the horses. “If you’re referring to the tarts, may I remind you that they’re hired help.”
The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of his bed partners. Jessica did not want to think about how he’d amused himself at night while she lay sleepless in her bed, fretting about the wedding night and her lack of experience—not to mention her lack of the Rubenesque figure he was so revoltingly partial to.
Gloomily certain that her marriage would be a debacle—no matter what Genevieve said—Jessica did not want to care whether she pleased him in bed or not. She could not get the better of her pride, though, and that feminine vanity couldn’t bear the prospect of failing to captivate a husband. Any husband, even him. Neither of Genevieve’s spouses had ever dreamt of straying, nor had any of the lovers she’d discreetly taken during her long widowhood.
But now was hardly the time to wrestle with that daunting problem, Jessica told herself. It made more sense to take the opportunity to get some practical matters sorted out. Like the guest list.
“I know where your female companions fit on your social scale,” she said. “The men are another matter. Mr. Beaumont, for instance. Aunt Louisa says one may not invite him to the wedding breakfast because he isn’t good ton. But he is your friend.”
“You bloody well better not invite him,” Dain said, his jaw hardening. “Buggering sod tried to spy on me when I was with a whore. Invite him to the wedding and the swine will think he’s invited to attend the wedding night as well. What with the opium and drink, he probably can’t get his own rod to stand to attention—so he watches someone else do it.”
Jessica discovered that the image of Rubenesque trollops writhing in his lap wasn’t nearly so agitating as what now appeared in her mind’s eye: six and a half feet of dark, naked,arousedmale.
She had a good idea of what arousal looked like. She’d seen some of Mr. Rowlandson’s erotic engravings. She wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want so vivid an image of Dain doing with a voluptuous whore what the men in Rowlandson’s pictures had been doing.
The picture hung in her mind, bold as the illuminations displayed during national celebrations, and it twisted her insides into knots and made her want to kill somebody.
She was not simply jealous, she was madly so—and he’d put her into this mortifying state with but a few careless words. Now she looked into the future, and saw him doing it again and again, until he made her completely insane.
She should not let him do it to her, Jessica knew. She should not be jealous of his tarts. She should thank her lucky stars for them, because he’d spend as little time as possible with her, while she would be a wealthy noblewoman, free to conduct her life as she wished. She’d told herself this a thousand times at least, since the day he’d so insolently proposed and she’d stupidly let her heart soften.
Lecturing herself didn’t do any good. She knew he was perfectly awful and he’d used her abominably and he was incapable of affection and he was wedding her mainly for revenge…and she wanted him to want only her, all the same.
“Have I finally shocked you?” Dain asked. “Or are you merely sulking? The silence has become deafening.”
“I am shocked,” she said tartly. “It would never occur to me that you would mind being watched. You seem to delight in public scenes.”
“Beaumont was watching through apeephole,” Dain said. “In the first place, I can’t abide sneaks. In the second, I paid for a whore—not to perform, gratis, for an audience. Third, there are certain activities I prefer to conduct in private.”
The carriage drive at this point began to veer northward, away from the banks of the Serpentine. The horses struggled to continue along the riverbank, aiming at a stand of trees. Dain smoothly corrected their direction without appearing to take any notice of what he was doing.
“At any rate, I felt obliged to clarify my rules with the aid of my fists,” he went on. “It’s more than possible Beaumont holds a grudge. I shouldn’t put it past him to take out his ill feeling on you. He’s a coward and a sneak and he has a nasty habit of…” He trailed off, frowning. “At any rate,” he went on, his expression grim, “you’re to have nothing to do with him.”
